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Tuesday, 12 June 2012

Red River to Ottawa ~ ongoing displacements

"The 132-year-old log and plaster home, where Louis Riel lay in state
after his execution for treason in 1885, has fallen victim to the
federal cuts to Parks Canada's budget."

I find it supremely annoying when media refer to Harper conservatives as representative of The West. It is a very specific version of the west that the conservatives are both drawn from and represent, in terms of class and culture, and the political empowerment, economic safeguarding, historical figures, culture heroes, and/or physical culture of The Actual West, are no safer in their hands than back in the day of John A.

The distance between the Red River and Ottawa has not collapsed from the time of Louis Riel's poetry or the time of Pauline Johnson's notes in The Shaganappi (1913), and the shipment of Manitoba historical artifacts (not only the contents of Riel House) down east is an insult to the region. In an era of return of artifacts to those to whom they hold meaning, this retraction of cultural possessions and jobs away from the people and province of Manitoba is another face of the imbalance that Thomas Mulcair so candidly observed.

It is not only the manufacturing industry that is languishing whilst the conservatives continue their lovefest with global oil. With zooming unemployment in the arts and sciences and among the young, this government's interests are very specific. The kinds of jobs and the quality of life intended is precisely fitted to the needs of the oil patch and the pipelines, and resource extraction in general, and very disruptive to the breadth of Canada's population, going about our days (and generations).

The reformatting of Canadian history and current reality is an ongoing pledge, taken by Harper, Baird, Toews, and all of their classmates. It is fundamentally hostile to anything that might be reasonably described as "long-term" or "inclusive" Canadian interests, the formation of a super-settler state on the re-buried bones of our actual ancestors.

Some part of the funding earmarked for Defense Department overruns [bombing other people's homelands: my original read "the Canadian Museum for Human Rights" but Rhiannon Bennett let me know the funding has been variously announced, clawed back, and minimally restored] should swiftly be diverted to protect the programming and support the ongoing access to actual local culture of Manitoba.

1 comment:

"The government restored more than half of the Riel House funding in the wake of public outrage. With that, the MMF stepped up to take over the operations, saying it should easily be able to fill in the remainder." CBC